


it cuts deep

by Anonymous



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Brainwashing, Captivity, Character Death, Dark, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Torture, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, which is neither Steve nor Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-21
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-15 12:18:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13613220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Steve wakes up in a room with the Winter Soldier and a chair.It's not the chance to reach Bucky that he thinks it is.It's the Winter Soldier's chance to reach what he thinks is another Hydra Asset.





	it cuts deep

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to MrGoodbar and Hadespuppy for their fantastic beta reading!
> 
> The amazing PashminaChinchilla made a [podfic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13923789). Check it out!

Everything hurt: sharp pains in his chest and dull aches in his muscles, as bad when he used to catch the flu every winter back in Brooklyn. There was a pounding in his head, like water rushing past, and for a confused moment he thought he was underwater.

His eyes didn't focus immediately when he opened them—a bad sign. He hadn't been this bad off since before he'd received the serum. But then—the memories came back to him sluggishly—he had just fallen all the way from the helicarrier into the Potomac.

He blinked at the ceiling—cracked gray cement, not usual for an Avengers hospital—and tried and failed to move. Something was holding his body down, and he couldn't even look down properly because his head was being held in place as well. Hazy panic started to trickle down his spine, then he heard something in the room—clothes shifting—and his adrenaline spiked. 

"Who's there?"

There was no answer, just the sound of the person moving then a heavy clunk and whirring of machinery near his head. Steve flinched violently away but the restraints held and he couldn't move while cold metal clamped around his head, blocking part of his vision.

He strained as hard as he could against the restraints, his body tensing and protesting until he thought he would retch, teeth gritted against the pain. That was when a hand clamped around his throat, and then Bucky's face was very close to his.

"Don't fight it," said Bucky. "You're sick. This will fix you."

Steve choked—just stared at Bucky, his stringy, dirty hair hanging around his face, the bags under his dead eyes. His mouth moved as he tried and failed to gasp in air, until black spots overwhelmed his vision, and his eyelids fluttered closed. Those fingers released him and he sucked in a desperate breath, his whole attention narrowing to his body's desperate need for oxygen. Fingers touched his lips and then something was pushing in and filling his mouth. He instinctively tried to spit it out but Bucky's fingers clamped around his jaw, holding it still. He panicked but his next breath still came unobstructed.

He fixed his eyes on Bucky, grinding his teeth on the plastic object in his mouth, but all Bucky said was, "Don't bite your tongue," before moving away.

Steve's body wasn't responding; all he managed to do was curl his fingers around the arm rest, eyes darting around in vain to find Bucky. There was the sound of a switch being thrown, a hum of electricity that built, and then the world was lit up with blinding pain. Lightning flashed through his body, deep into the bones. He could hear screaming. Just let it end, _please_ —

And then, just as suddenly as it started, it was gone. He huffed out breaths, his body shaking uncontrollably. He couldn't move. There was something in his mouth. _How did he get here?_

He stiffened when another person came into view—for a second he didn't recognize them, before realizing it was Bucky—leaning over him and pulling out the plastic mouth guard. There were teeth marks embedded deep into the thing.

"What's your name, soldier?"

He licked his lips and shook his head side to side slightly. "Bucky ... what ..."

Bucky's expression didn't change but Steve got the feeling that he had disappointed him somehow. He stepped back and then Steve heard a voice that made his blood freeze.

"The chair needs calibration."

He didn't move as Bucky bent over and started to release him from the chair. He didn't want to believe it was true. Why had Bucky taken him here? When the last of the metal restraints was unlocked he leaped forward, landed a hit across Bucky's face, ignoring the way his body protested. Bucky didn't make a sound, stepping back gracefully with the punch, and kicked Steve in the back, sending him flying to the ground. He didn't leave Steve a chance to recover, aiming another kick at Steve's gut, and another, until Steve was curled up, arms held tight around his middle.

Steve retched once, and then pushed himself slowly up on his knees. "What's he doing here ... Bucky, _Buck!_ "

"You're the same as me."

Steve caught a glimpse of Zola's glowing green features and made a weak lunge towards the computer screen. Bucky pushed him back easily, barely seeming to notice the interruption.

"Another asset. You just need to be fixed."

"No ... Bucky, you're not—you're a person. We're _people!_ "

"He's been out of the chair for too long. His mind is deteriorating."

The binary representation of Zola's face was expressionless, more machine than man, dispassionately viewing the room. Steve's hand clenched, nails scratching at the cement floor, imagining punching the screen straight through.

"Force him to accept this. _Break_ him and then you and he can can return to fighting together like you used to."

*

Bucky held him down and forced Steve into handcuffs. He dragged Steve out of the room and down a hallway, and when Steve tried to fight back at the entrance of a small empty room, Bucky punched him in the face so hard he lost consciousness for a moment.

He came to with his wrists and ankles cuffed together, lying on his stomach on the cold floor. There were droplets of blood under his face. He was sure that if he had been operating at 100% he would be able to break out of the restraints, but none of his wounds had been treated, and the pounding of his head and general fatigue told him that no-one had tried to give him any food or fluids.

He couldn't even move trussed up like this. The most he could do was sit up awkwardly, and try to slam his shoulder into the door. He tried shouting for Bucky but all he could hear was an old fan whirring away somewhere. Eventually he just slid down to the floor, lay with his back up against the wall and closed his eyes.

He drifted, half-asleep, mind hazily moving from one incoherent train of thought to another. He wasn't sure how long it had been when Bucky finally came back. He helped Steve sit up, and held a bottle of water to his lips, waiting while Steve drank from it. Steve finished and leaned back, Bucky stayed squatting next to him.

"Bucky," said Steve. "That's Arnim Zola. He's the one who tortured you, who wiped your memory. I can get you away from him, but you need to help me."

"He's Hydra," said Bucky simply, as though that explained everything.

"Hydra is _finished_ ," Steve spat out. "A computer program. That's all that's left. There's nothing for you here."

"That's why you need to stop fighting. We're weapons of Hydra. We can bring order back to the world. You need to realize that."

"He's lying." Steve edged forward, bumped his thigh up against Bucky's. "Everything he's told you is a lie!"

Bucky stared down at Steve's legs, like he was confused by the touch, before he looked up again, an expression on his face that Steve recognized from back in Brooklyn, when Bucky would plead with Steve not to do something stupid.

"I know we used to fight together. Just give in, and we can fix you."

*

Bucky left him again after that. Steve lay on his side and closed his eyes. He needed to heal.

After several hours Bucky came in and released him. Steve got a few good hits in, until finally Bucky, frustration written over his face, dug his fingers into the bullet wounds in Steve's stomach, provoking a scream. Those fingers left him quickly, but the lingering pain left him unable to do anything except clutch his middle with shaking arms, as Bucky started to drag him away to the other room to hook him up to the chair again.

"Captain America is not as invulnerable as we thought," taunted Zola from his screen, 0s and 1s stretched across his face in a wide smile. "Leaving the human element intact was Erskine's mistake."

Steve's turned his head to try to find Bucky, his head swimming at the motion and the room tilting all around him. Metal closed around his face and he tried to speak when he felt Bucky's fingers on his jaw, but Bucky ignored him, prying his mouth open and inserting the mouth guard. The machine started to hum and he clutched the arm rests, chest heaving in shallow breaths. He squeezed his eyes shut.

The shock of pain was enough to freeze the air in his lungs. His back arched, muscles tensing like they were about to snap. Muffled screams came through the mouth guard, and he felt himself falling away.

He didn't know who he was when he woke up, gasping in an unfamiliar room, until he saw Bucky's face and it all came back. He tried to spit out the mouth guard and Bucky moved forward, pulling it out for him.

"Stop this," Steve said, voice coming out no louder than a whisper. Bucky snarled and spun around, throwing the mouth guard at the wall.

And that was the beginning of a seemingly endless cycle: wipe, fail, repeat. Steve knew what Zola wanted. Another mindless asset for Hydra. Something to raise Hydra from the ashes Steve had burnt down. He wouldn't give in. Someone would find them from the information Natasha had leaked. Bucky would break free of the brainwashing. He just had to hold on.

*

Bucky wasn't listening. When Steve wasn't in the chair, he tried to talk to Bucky, to tell him things about their past, to try and spark that look of recognition he'd seen at the very end, in the crumbling wreck of the falling helicarrier. Bucky would shut Steve up, punch him, choke him, shove his silver hand in Steve's mouth so he couldn't talk, and then he would lean forward and talk himself: telling Steve to stop fighting, telling him the awful things the Winter Soldier had done and that he didn't care, because he was a tool for Hydra to make the world better.

His words were those of a Hydra zealot, but his voice lacked all the usual passion. His delivery was emotionless: like he was repeating something second-hand. Steve wasn't even sure how much Bucky actually remembered, but he had no doubt that Zola was filling the blank spaces in Bucky's mind with lies whenever he was out of Steve's reach.

Bucky spoke up the next time he entered Steve's cell, standing in the doorway and waiting until Steve looked his way.

"I was a spy for Hydra during the war. I led the men into a trap and volunteered for the experiments."

"Zola feeding you these lines? Tell him to come up with something more believable."

Bucky's face hardened and he strode over to take Steve to the chair again.

*

Steve shifted, putting his weight on his bound arms and taking it off his burning side. He glanced down, trying to check on the wounds. The suit was stained a dark purple; it was dry but he couldn't be sure the bullet wounds had stopped bleeding without looking.

He still felt as weak as ever. The hours blended together—it felt like he had been here for days. Bucky hadn't given him any food, just water occasionally. A pit had opened up in his stomach, like his body was consuming itself from the inside out. He couldn't wait anymore.

He lay quietly on the floor when Bucky came in, letting him unlock the restraints. The second his hands were free he swung his legs to the side, catching Bucky off his guard and tipping him over. He rolled over on top of Bucky, fists clenched to punch, subdue him, he just needed Bucky to _listen_ for one second, but his punch was knocked back easily, pain radiating up his arm as Bucky's metal arm blocked it.

The next second Bucky had rolled them over, pinning him before Steve's dull senses had the chance to formulate his next move. He lay there, stunned, as Bucky straddled him. It had been a trick, he realized. Bucky had deliberately left himself open.

Bucky's hands clenched around Steve's wrists, bringing them up and slamming them down on the ground again. He leaned forwards, hissing out the next words.

"I killed Howard. His wife too."

It took a moment to sink in. Steve sucked in a short, sharp breath, the realization spreading inside him like poison, stinging.

He closed his eyes to get away from Bucky's fierce gaze.

"It wasn't you."

*

Bucky seemed to know he'd hit a nerve.

"I remember my missions. The ambassador's wife and kid were there. Unexpected but they couldn't be left alive. I gave them quick deaths: a clean slice of the throat. I don't care. We were made for following orders, and killing. Sentiment is not in our role."

Steve didn't feel anything in reaction to that except a bone-deep exhaustion. He knew Hydra had made Bucky do awful things as the Winter Soldier. But it was all in the abstract—he didn't know these people and he couldn't feel for them. And there was no revenge to be taken, except by burning Hydra down to the ground and freeing Bucky.

"...Why do you want me to be an asset?"

 _Why do you care so much?_ he wanted to say, but he knew why. It was the same reason he had been fighting for Bucky all this time. They both wanted the same thing—they were looking for someone underneath the other person: Steve was trying to reach Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier was trying to reach the Hydra Asset Captain America.

"Because you belong with Hydra." The trailing 'with me' was no less noticeable for being unsaid.

"You're chasing a ghost," said Steve, and he braced himself as Bucky grabbed him to take him away for the next round.

*

Steve wasn't healing. Bucky would bring in water but just barely enough to wet his dry mouth. He drifted in and out of consciousness when he was out of the chair, waking now and then to see Bucky next to him, whispering poison in his ear.

It was taking longer for his mind to come back after each session in the chair. Things like the exact details of the battle in Washington DC were getting harder to remember. The chair must have been used to create the Winter Soldier, but the increasingly irritated and desperate look on Bucky's face told him that it wasn't working quite as well now. But then, Steve had more to fight for than Bucky had had back then.

His mind was still hanging on but his body was failing. The question crossed his mind whether the serum would let him die, or if it could keep his heart pumping long after death should have found him, if it would put him into hibernation like it did when he was under the ice.

*

Steve's eyes snapped open, jolting him out of sleep suddenly. He felt more rested than usual, like he'd been asleep for longer. He looked over to the door to see Bucky stalking over. He kneeled next to him, holding a smart phone on the floor so Steve could see. Steve stared at the phone screen, a closeup of a smiling woman and man, happier times from whoever owned the phone. Bucky pulled it back, tapping at the screen for a minute before putting it back in Steve's field of vision, a video loading.

There was a view of a floor, then a jumble of images too fast to discern as the camera man moved the phone inexpertly. A small room with cream colored walls, a vase of flowers by the window, a bed, someone sleeping.

Steve's mouth went dry all of a sudden, a fuzzy ringing sound in his head starting up.

The camera moved forwards, and a metal arm reached out to roughly turn the old woman over in the bed. She opened her eyes, startled, as she looked above the camera.

"Who—? What—Sergeant Barnes?"

"Stop it!" Steve swung his head forwards and Bucky danced away easily, the video still playing.

The metal arm was around her neck now, her face turning red. Steve slammed his eyes shut but opened them a second later when he was slapped across the face, head whipping back.

"Watch it," hissed Bucky.

"No, no—!"

She was struggling, hands scrabbling weakly at those silver fingers. Where were her guards, why had no-one seen Bucky enter the room?

Bucky held Steve's head in an iron grip, the phone held right up to Steve's face. His eyes blazed as he gritted out, "Don't look away."

It took too long, longer than Steve had expected for her movements to finally cease, arms slipping down and eyes freezing in blank terror.

"Peggy," he gasped, the name tearing out of his burning throat.

Bucky let go of him, and Steve's next breath came in a sob, her last moments replaying again and again in his head. She'd been so scared, she hadn't even known what was happening, how could Bucky—

A ragged scream forced its way out of Steve's throat and he lunged forward as he tried to attack Bucky, hands clenched uselessly into fists behind him.

"You think that's not me," Bucky said, speaking fast, moving out of Steve's reach, Steve's body jerking wildly against his restraints. "This is me, more than I ever was. I remember her—"

"No!"

"I told you to be careful with her: that women like that—focused on their careers—they didn't want a husband, they just wanted someone to keep house for them. You thought I was being overprotective. I wasn't. I wanted you to forget about her."

Steve collapsed, grinding his face into the ground as he shook his head back and forth. "It's not you, it's not you," he repeated, but no-one had heard that conversation, no-one but Bucky.

"I remembered her, and I was _happy_ to get to kill her. You didn't care about anything but her once you met her. You left me to _die_ because of her!"

His words rang out in the concrete room, the echo slowly fading until there was only the sound of Steve's gasping breaths.

*

He didn't fight back when he was dragged to the chair. The metal came round his head and he closed his eyes, welcoming the pain.

*

He opened his eyes. A man with brown hair and a tense expression on his face stood over him and pulled something out of his mouth.

"What's your name, soldier?"

His eyes tracked all around. Nothing was familiar. He looked back at the man.

"I don't know. Tell me, please."


End file.
